


the vital organs

by qwerty24



Category: Silent Witness (TV)
Genre: Angst, Case Fic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:27:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28270884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwerty24/pseuds/qwerty24
Summary: Post-series 23. Jack and Nikki try to find a way forward, together. A new case threatens their delicate balance, and the past looms large.Can they heal? Can they come out unscathed?
Relationships: Nikki Alexander/Jack Hodgson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	the vital organs

The body is a place of violence.

—[Jeannine Hall Gailey](https://womensvoicesforchange.org/poetry-sunday-introduction-to-the-body-in-fairy-tales-by-jeannine-hall-gailey.htm)

* * *

When it ends with Matt, she can barely find it in herself to be surprised.

It’s a slow-moving car crash. _Nikki,_ he texts her one morning, and by the time she calls him after work, she already knows what’s coming.

He tells her he loves her, that she could still make this work, and he sounds sincere, like he really misses her. Maybe once upon a time, when she was younger, less tired and more reckless, she would have said yes.

But it’s waning light on a Friday evening. Alone in her car, running low on petrol, staring out at an empty parking lot. And later, she’ll be at home, watching some mindless drivel on television, alone again.

When they met, she was a different person. Back from the brink of death. Diving headfirst into life. Being with him felt like taking uppers.

Now he’s thousands of miles away.

Now there’s a dead man in the freezer she has to finish on Monday.

Now this is her life, and it’s not much, but she needs to hold onto it.

She says goodbye first. He sounds almost desperate.

When she hangs up, all the lights in the Lyell have dimmed. Even the techs are gone for the night.

She takes a swig of day-old coffee. It’s bitter and stale. She lets the taste linger. Uses her sleeve to wipe away a lone tear.

* * *

It’s the smell first. It usually is, but the unseasonably warm September and the steam grates by the body amplify the decomp smell into a pungent, sickly-sweetness. A SOCO standing off to the side of the police tape looks like he’s going to be sick.

She’s late. Hungover too. Matt’s gone and now so are pieces of a future she dared to imagine.

Jack is already there. Poring over a pool of blood and mess of strewn clothes.

The girl is fifteen, maybe. Tanner four or five. Nikki can tell because the victim is down to her underwear, everything stained an arterial red.

Jack plucks a maggot out of a wound on the girl’s arm with a pair of tweezers. The cut meets bone.

“Not skiving again, Nikki?” Jack teases. But she’s down on the ground groping through the victim’s hair, looking for something.

He sees what she’s trying to untangle out of a matted knot. Shiny, glinting in the morning light.

A necklace. Nikki dangles if off her forefinger when it finally comes loose. The letter T embossed on a delicate gold coin.

She turns it over in her palm so Jack can get a photo of the back.

“Forever, C.” he reads out.

Nikki gives him a look. Wry, but something like sadness too.

She surveys the crime scene.

Forever, and now this.

* * *

DI Bane is the SIO. Jack thinks of Batman. But the inspector is less supervillain and more midlife crisis. Bags under his eyes, coffee attached to his hand, shirt wrinkled, tie askew.

He enters the meeting room yapping loudly on his phone wedged between his ear and shoulder while his number two, DS Wei, corrals him to his seat. She shoots the team an apologetic smile, clearly used to his artlessness.

“Dr Alexander,” Nikki reaches her hand out to Bane, “we met briefly at the scene?”

“Right, right,” he mutters, still on the phone, barely an upward glance.

DS Wei takes her hand instead. “Hi, sorry about him, DS Wei, you can call me Jen.”

She nods toward her DI, “Mike’s on with mis-pers, we might have an ID on our vic.”

* * *

Her name is Tania Koval. Fourteen-years-old.

It kind of kills Jack inside. Not that he hasn’t seen worse. Not that there isn’t worse. Just that she’s a kid on the cusp of life. But aren’t they all?

He thinks of Katie. The first girl he ever loved. Dead beneath an underpass.

He hates himself for it, but at least that was painless, or as painless as death can be, but this girl, Tania—of all the ways to go, this must be one of the worst.

Their victim looks washed out under the fluorescence of the cutting room. Small. Almost peaceful.

Nikki inserts a metal ruler into the stab wound under Tania’s left shoulder. “Eleven centimetres” she records. “But only two across.”

“A paring knife?” Jack suggests from the viewing gallery.

“Maybe.”

DS Jen Wei is observing too. DI Bane is in his car, “taking a call.”

“The stab wounds are definitely the cause of death?” Jen asks.

Nikki nods. “This one,” she points at a vertical wound slicing through Tania’s ribcage, “severed the aorta.” She points at another on Tania’s thigh. “This one cut the femoral artery. She suffered massive blood loss.”

“Would the guy need medical knowledge?”

“No, I don’t think—” Nikki falters. “Tania was stabbed 42 times. Her killer was always going to finish the job in the end.”

She brings her scalpel to the girl’s throat. Breaks the unmarred flesh there, the fat whitish-yellow beneath the skin.

* * *

It’s different now. Thomas dead. Clarissa gone. The halls are too quiet. It reminds her of home.

She finds Jack in the lab glued to a microscope, fiddling with the magnification.

She pauses in the doorway.

“The parents are coming in the afternoon.” He knows this is the part she dreads most. The dead are one thing, but the living, the left behind, there’s no preparing for it.

“You can’t show them her face.” He looks up. Finds her eyes.

There’s a shallow slash mark cutting across Tania’s features from her right temple to the opposite edge of her mouth.

A sign of hesitation? Or a message?

“Will you stay?”

He smiles, the smallest lopsided reassurance.

“Always.”

* * *

Nikki leaves the parents behind in the chapel and joins Jen in the hallway.

The sounds are almost inhuman. Their only daughter. Maybe subdued grief would be a worse affront.

“Did they ask you anything? The father, especially.”

“You think he might have something to—?” she finishes half-heartedly.

Jen is sympathetic. “You know how these things are. Who we look at first. Did they say anything about a boyfriend?”

“No. They’re convinced it was rape. Said she fell in with a bad crowd.”

“And was she?” Jen gives her a pointed look.

“You know I can’t say with absolute certainty. But if there’s DNA—” and she hopes, really hopes, there is, “—the report, I’ll have it to you by Wednesday.”

There’s an ungodly wail from the chapel.

Nikki rests the back of her head against the cool wall. Tries to think of beaches and blue skies.

How many times? How many dead girls?

She remembers another life, dry earth, small coffin, fighting for every breath. Why had she been so afraid?

Stepping into the dark. Perhaps she’d like that.

* * *

He’s waiting for her at his desk. Can tell she’s been crying in the bathroom. He knows it’s not just because of the case.

“I’ll drive you home. We can get your car tomorrow,” he says, less offer and more command.

She’s pliant as he helps her with her coat and leads her out to the car park. He wraps his arm around her angular shoulders. Remembers holding her before. Why do they only touch when horrible things happen?

She watches him from the passenger side. Reaches out a delicate finger, soft on his brow ridge.

“What happened?” The cut is still a little angry, tender at the edges. He’s attempted to help it along with a strip of butterfly tape, but the bruising is mottled and conspicuous.

“Extracurricular activities,” he tries for levity.

She thinks of glove against flesh, brittle bones, fault lines on the ocean floor. Six-years-old, her father’s hands, her mother’s jaw.

It’s pain even if you’re expecting it. A wound is a wound is a wound.

He’s looking at her. His mouth twitching. Not a smile.

When he was in hospital, her voice was what kept him on this side.

He wants to push her up against the glove compartment. Wants to take her wrists and pin them to the headrest.

Instead, he keeps both hands on the steering wheel, eyes trained out the windshield the whole drive.

_Jab, cross, uppercut._

Is it still sparring if your partner has their gloves down?

* * *

Overkill is the word Nikki is looking for. So why has the DNA on Tania’s underwear matched to an 86-year-old pensioner who lives above the pub she was found by? His only prior is for drink-driving ten years ago.

“What,” Jen demands, “you think old wankers can’t kill?”

“No,” Nikki tries to appease, “but this level of brutality, I mean, look at him.”

Keith Farlow is on the verge of passing out as Mike grills him on the other side of the glass. His solicitor has to hand him his inhaler.

“We know what you like, Keith, we’ve been all over your flat, found these DVDs of yours,” he says as he dramatically slaps a photo on the table.

“Blood, knife play, dead girls, that turn you on, yeah?” Mike gets up close with Farlow and picks up a different photo, one of Tania, and waves it in his face. “Come on, Keith, just tell us what you did to her.”

Farlow just gives him a forlorn look, sucking in one asthmatic breath after another.

* * *

He drives her home again. It’s two in the morning when they finish at the police station and it’s an hour back to the Lyell to get her car.

So she lets him fold her into the backseat and drape his jacket over her. Lets him drive her back to her cold, quiet, empty house.

She takes out her tablet. Swipes through Jack’s photos of the crime scene.

Photos of Tania’s torn clothing, emptied bookbag, scuffed loafers. From the lab: A strand of hair found on her body. “Unidentified male.” Blood and skin under her nails. “Unidentified male #2.” Swab from the inside of her cheek. “Unidentified male #3.” And her underwear. “Match: Keith Farlow.”

A school photo. The hockey team on a sunny day, Tania laughing at something outside the frame, beatific.

_What happened to you?_

Jack pulls up to the kerb in front of her house. Turns to look at her. “Goodnight.”

Neither of them move.

“Do you remember the desert? Mexico, I mean.”

He cuts the engine and shifts the hand brake. “Nikki,” and what else can he say? That the memories are all there beneath the surface? That he can never forget? “It’s better not to.”

Nikki bites the inside of her bottom lip. “It’s different. There are places I still can’t go, but now—”

He tastes salt. The pulsing heat. The strange things the mind chooses to keep. And let go.

“I hope you know.” She’s staring at a spot behind his left ear. She remembers the hospital, Thomas already gone, Jack next. Antiseptic, fear, and another emotion, desperation except more.

“I’m not sure I do.”

Her mouth is warm and liquid against his. She threads her hands through his hair, tugging at the nape of his neck.

He stills for the briefest of moments, finds her eyes, finally. She’s flushed under the weak interior lights of the car. Swallowing, hungry, wanting it, wanting him.

It’s like the first drag from a cigarette. Her skin is electric. His lips, her jaw, his tongue, her throat.

The centre console is trapped between them. She gropes around, low whine into his mouth at the space. She wants him close, closer. She wonders why they were ever apart.

His hands are large, touching her, then not, her shoulder, her collarbone, tugging her blouse out of her waistband, the give of her stomach, the arch of her back. She gasps, too hot and not enough.

And then. He pulls away.

She blinks. Can’t look at him.

“Nikki, I’m so sorry.” So why doesn’t he sound like he is?

His teeth gleam in the dark. She wants to know what it feels like when he sinks them into her skin.

She leaves.

He stays parked there, taillights ruby red on the open road when she closes her curtains.

Stabbed, shot at, run over, so why is this the worst, worst part?

* * *

In the morning, she ignores Jack’s calls. She takes a cab to work.

Mike Bane is standing outside the building, sopping wet even with the umbrella. Today she’s grateful for his surly face. She won’t have to lie to Jack. “It’s not a good time,” and she means it.

Mike slaps a damp manila folder on her desk. “You want to do the explaining, or should I?”

She peels it open to find a photo she took from Tania’s PM. It’s of a small tattoo on the back of her shin, just below the knee. An amateurish stick-and-poke of a petaled flower. A daisy, maybe.

Jack ran it through the database, but it was too simple to yield anything meaningful.

But whatever import it’s supposed to have, by the scowl Mike is giving her, it’s anything but meaningless.

“This—” and he draws out the word, too accusatory for her liking, “is a known pimp brand.”

* * *

The first girl they found the tattoo on was an OD. The file on her is a thin twenty pages.

The second girl was a jumper. From a thirty-fifth-floor rooftop bar.

It was only when major crimes took the third girl that they made a connection. Face down in the pool at her boarding school. Amphetamines through the roof on her tox report. If she wasn’t the daughter of some baron, she would have joined the other two in oblivion.

All of them texted the same burner. Their “boyfriend.” They went to the same hotels. They had the same tattoo.

 _Who is running them?_ Mike has taken the opportunity to scrawl in giant red letters on the inside cover. He’s underlined the “who” ten times in different colours. His version of police work.

Nikki almost respects him for it.

* * *

Mike sends Jen in to hold Keith Farlow’s feet to the fire. He actually looks the faintest bit proud when Farlow starts crying at the mention of his granddaughter. Nikki’s not so sure if it’s the right way in.

“What was she doing there, Keith? Who did you buy her from? You paid for her, but she wouldn’t listen, so you had to teach her a lesson!” Jen’s pulling out all the stops. But Farlow just rests his head down on the table, the old, weak man he is coming into focus.

His solicitor says he needs a break.

Jen comes out, shaking her head. She pops a nicotine lozenge. Mike pats her on the back like he’s her coach.

When she ducks back inside, Farlow is pacing around.

His solicitor smiles. A hyena. “Keith would like to tell you the truth. In exchange for some leniency.”

* * *

Jack is livid. “He touched her?”

Jen’s agitated too, jaw clenching, brow furrowed, “So he finds her dead, decides to fulfil some sick fantasy and leaves her to rot out there? What in the—”

“We have to do elimination on everything. The whole scene, her body. It’s all contaminated.”

Who lives and who dies, its’s never up to them. And Nikki doesn’t wish it was. But sometimes, floundering in shallow water, scrabbling for land, it can’t be wrong to wish for bright, clean spaces.

No despair, only wanted journeys, exit signs fading in the rear-view mirror.

* * *

The nights are always like this lately: cold, late, the two of them together in the cutting room, the lab, the car park.

Together, but all the dead between them. And that mistake in his car. A mistake, except she remembers the slope of his cheek, the rasp of his breath, his rough hands. A mistake, except if he would choose it again, she would too.

He has Tania’s clothes laid out neatly under his lamp. Signals for Nikki to flip the lights off. Everything glows ice and electric. But only the highlighted notes on her report fluoresce bubblegum pink.

Jack slams the torch down. “Nothing.”

The whites of his eyes glint.

The dead speak their own language. She feels tender toward them. But the living. She has no time for hushed words or breathless desire.

Doubt is one thing, forgivable and completely human. She knows it well. Certainty is a foolishness all its own.

She turns the lights back on. They crackle and hiss.

“I don’t want to do this. Not anymore.” For all the stock she puts in eloquence, she can only flail her hand in his direction.

He steps toward her. Menacing or yearning?

She doesn’t want apologies. Never has.

“Say it.”

“I can’t.”

“Nikki.”

* * *

It’s raining again. Spots darkening on her blouse as she leads him toward the front door. It rattles behind them.

She can’t think of a time when they were in the other’s home and something good was happening. His brother, her career. Someone dead, someone dying.

Is it a sign?

If this is wrong, then all she needs is to be wrong this one time. And she’ll atone for the rest of her life.

Her bedroom is draughty. She shivers under her coat. He unbuttons it and slips it off her shoulders anyway. Her shirt too. Steps closer to her again so their bodies are almost touching, but not quite.

She suddenly feels very unkind toward him.

This slow-dancing evasion. They’ve done this a thousand times. Not tonight.

She kisses him, all teeth and wet desperation. He gives as good as he gets. One hand on the base of her throat, the other on her shoulder, pushing her backward.

The bed is rumpled and cool under her back. He looms over her. She can feel him. Hard against her hip. Why did she ever think he wouldn’t want this too?

When he cups her over her underwear, she squirms and keens, too eager, already liquid and needy. She tries to touch him too. But he grabs her hands, both of them in one of his, and stops her.

“I want to see you,” he says urgently.

She shivers. This time, it’s not from the cold.

He leans down to kiss her. She tastes blood. She thinks it’s her own.

She fucks herself against the heel of his palm, then with his fingers. He nips at her neck, her breasts, the slope of her stomach. It’s too much. It’s not enough. She needs to forget. This case, work, her whole life too.

She whimpers his name. It sounds pathetic.

But he shifts over her, the angle just different enough, and adds another finger inside her. He whispers reassurances into her hair. She can’t hear him above her own moaning. He thrusts hard, down to the knuckle. She comes around his hand. Hips fucking off the bed. Struggling and clenching.

He watches her. Now, and all the time.

* * *

That night she dreams of wounds.

Puckered skin. Tender insides.

She feels split open. Burning everywhere he touched her.

* * *

The women’s bathroom at the police station smells like someone has been vaping pineapples.

She’s trying to fix the collar of her shirt. Hide the marks he left on her.

She wanted to reciprocate. But when she woke up to the crimson break of dawn he was gone.

Compromised men, cruel men, dead men. She tends to have a type.

She remembers his hands. Calloused. Gentle. Always careful with this dead body. That sliver of a sample. Closed fist making contact with some poor fool’s face. Around the grip of a gun. Hammer, trigger, sight. Inside a pair of nitrile gloves. Inside her.

She turns on the tap. Puts her mouth under the stream. Tries to wash out the taste of him.

* * *

She meets Jack at the school. Tania’s classmates peer out of windows on the second floor as the headmaster leads them to her locker.

The inside is decorated with photos, dried flowers, sticky notes with positive affirmations, _you can do it!,_ little hearts in gel pen. Just a teenage girl.

He bags it all one by one. Textbooks, makeup compacts, dog-eared notes. Tries not to think about it too hard.

Nikki is swabbing students in the teacher’s lounge down the hall. He can see the back of her head.

“You’ve got nothing to prove.” She’d said to him once upon a time.

He remembers that very first day. Gloomy hotel room, Tyvek suit, messy blonde hair, and when she turned around, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Another memory: gunshots ringing in the woods, her small hand in his, a dead girl in a freezer. Crumpled on the asphalt. Knife to the stomach. Breathing in fumes. Hospital bed. Different hospital bed.

She’s always there, in every memory. Is he in hers?

He doesn’t want to hurt her.

He thinks of how happy she looked with Matt. He thinks of switchblades, daggers, scalpels. He thinks of dark places. How she sounds on the other end of the phone. He thinks of her mouth, her body, her breathless cries.

No, he doesn’t want to hurt her. But he thinks he already has.

* * *

Jen is standing in the kitchen waiting for the coffee machine. She has her head tilted back, popping Nicorette from the blister pack straight into her mouth.

She waves as Nikki approaches.

“Trying to quit.” She shakes her head. “Now I’m hooked on these instead.”

Nikki smiles. She quite likes the feisty yet thoughtful young woman. Almost reminds her of herself. From a time when she had total faith in justice and science and medicine. When she believed in being steadfast and full of conviction.

Jen points toward the viewing gallery where she’s set herself up. “Fancy slogging through a fourteen-year-old girl’s deep thoughts? I have about six more journals for you.”

It’s late. The weekend looms ahead of her, long and empty.

She obliges.

* * *

Every entry is in a different colour of glitter pen. Tania had lovely penmanship. Loopy y’s and rounded o’s. Little drawings of animals and plants in the margins.

Small dramas, _Lilith hates me!,_ bigger grievances, _mum and dad are getting divorced,_ and girlhood anxieties, _I wish I was beautiful,_ populate the pages. About ten months in, early signs of danger, _I’ve decided to stop eating today._ Early signs of risk, _I want someone to save me._

Then, in the third journal which starts in March of last year.

_I’ve met the most amazing man._

Nikki feels her stomach tighten. She knows how this goes and where it ends.

_I’ll do anything for C._

C? C. From her necklace, the one they found that first day at the crime scene.

 _He loves me._

* * *

This time, Jack goes to her. She was supposed to be in DC today. To meet Matt’s children. Instead, she’s moping around the house going through the motions of cleaning and cooking and living.

She answers the door. He hands her a box of supermarket pastries and pushes past her into the doorway. Does he think he’s attending a funeral luncheon?

He can see her bedroom just down the hall. He tries not to think about what they did there.

“I’m sorry,” are the first words out of his mouth. How many times does she have to tell him she doesn’t want apologies?

She studies his arms. Sees his muscles twitch and flex as he fidgets nervously. It’s a rare emotion coming from him. She wonders what it would be like, those arms braced above her.

“It’s too soon,” he explains. Too soon from what? Since when? Since the last time one of them was dying? Since they restrained themselves from this thing growing between them?

“I disagree.” It sounds petulant. Very unlike what she imagined in her head, whatever room was left in there for thinking, what with him sitting so close to her, breathing so near her.

“You’re vulnerable.”

 _Vulnerable._ She’s heard that word before. She kind of hates it. Isn’t it eminently human to be vulnerable, breakable, open to the world? What would he want, that she harden herself against everything good that might happen in whatever life she has left? That she give up on him now?

She remembers visiting him in hospital. How weak he was at first, how he could barely turn his head to look at her. She thinks of the people they’ve lost. Thomas and Leo. Clarissa and Harry. Her father. Her mother. His too. She’s so tired of waiting.

“How would you know?”

She tells him to leave.

He tells her he’s sorry. Again.

He touches her wrist.

She sucks him off in the foyer. It’s too bad she chose this spot because she’ll have to think about it every time she goes through the door.

He’s making low, needy sounds. She wraps her hand around the base of his cock. The floor is cool against her bare knees. He braces a forearm against the wall. Rests his head against it and looks down at her.

She ignores his piercing gaze. Where are all those platitudes now?

He runs his fingers through her hair. Rests his hand there. Doesn’t make her move even though she wishes he would.

He’s hard and hot against the back of her throat.

She has the strangest memory of the smoking fuselage of a plane. She’s wet between her thighs. She moans around him. Doesn’t even bother to pretend otherwise.

She lets him come in her mouth. She thinks it’s trust. But it’s probably something else. Something much, much worse.

* * *

C is Charlie Dawson. Who is now sitting in Interview 1 with Mike playing the bad cop while a wet-behind-the-ears DC moonlights as a sympathetic ally.

He looks 25-years-old max. He’s wearing a ridiculous puffer jacket in 19-degree weather. There’s something menacing in the way he toys around conspicuously with the gold cross around his neck. A man of god and all his dead girlfriends.

Even his solicitor has the good sense to look disgusted as Mike fans out the photos on the table.

Dawson just grins. “Taking pictures of my girls costs extra.”

Mike slams his fist into the table. The DC flinches for real even as Dawson stares straight ahead.

Sometimes there’s no grand twist. No flicker of light at the end of the tunnel. Just bleak, human evil around every turn.

Jen turns up three hours later with an evidence bag held gingerly in front of her. It’s a fish gutting knife. A week later Dawson’s DNA will turn up as a match all over the handle. So will his blood under Tania’s nails. Two weeks later Nikki will testify to the same in court. The CPS will say Dawson was trying to make “an example” out of Tania when she tried to leave him.

And later, there’s always a new body.

Freezer, cutting room, home. Lately, she’s always cold.

She tries to picture the desert. Excavating a skull. _Occipital, parietal, temporal. Zygoma, mandible, maxilla._

She thinks of Jack’s beaten and bruised face. She thinks of the sun, of places above the surface of the earth.

What was she looking for all this time?

* * *

She straddles him. He groans beneath her. Her breath is damp and shallow on his chest.

He’s sitting against the headboard. This time they’re in his flat.

“I want to fuck you _._ ” His voice is strained and raspy.

She just grinds down harder on his thigh. The friction is like holding her hand in the space over a lit match. She could come from just this. She can’t get enough air. She presses her mouth over his. Wants him to resuscitate the dead things inside her.

His hand snakes down her body to reach the place where they’re touching. He spreads her open for him. She’s soaked. He looks wrecked.

“Tell me.” Then she’ll let him do whatever he wants to her.

“I love you.”

It’s not what she wanted or expected from him. She’s not a girl. She knows better than to believe the things men say when they’re like this.

No, she’s not a girl. But he’s not just a man.

He reaches up, traces her jawline. Rubs her cheek with his thumb. Kisses her sweetly, then cruelly.

She takes him in her hand and guides him to her. She moans when he enters her. Words, maybe. But he can’t make them out over the slick sounds of their bodies and her urgent whimpers.

He rests his hand on the small of her back, steadying her. It’s too tender. He’s thick and heavy inside her. He fills her in places she didn’t know she wanted him. He drops his head to whisper into the spot behind her ear. _“It’s okay._ ”

She comes with a violent shudder. He’s warm and sticky seeping out of her. Body fluids and no crime scene. What a wonder.

* * *

It’s Monday when she sees him again. The lab is quiet.

She flips on the light. He’s sitting in the corner with his laptop and a coffee.

“Hiya.”

“Hi.”

She pulls up a chair to sit across from him.

“Did I ever tell you about my mother?”

She shakes her head at herself. Maybe neuroses are better saved for after sex. She closes her eyes. Sees flames and her own self in childhood. Her mother's split lip, tending to her paper cut. He was a boy once too. Gangly limbs, scraped knuckles. They’ve done all right, she thinks.

She tries again.

“Next time, I want to stay. I want you to stay.”

He smiles.

“I have terrible morning breath.”

“I know you do.”

She pushes flasks and pipettes out of the way. Leans in to kiss him. He tastes sweet and bitter like fruit rinds and dark roast.

It’s like praying for grace, she thinks. Like wishing on stars and finding the moon in your backyard.

The sun is a bright white gash in the sky. She can feel the lub-dub thump of her heart.

He kisses her again.

She kisses him back.


End file.
